1 Rule for Neo-Fascism: A Parody of Crisis and Populism:
Preamble: --Here I was, with a mounting pile of increasingly-dense tomes on structural crises1 Rule for Neo-Fascism: A Parody of Crisis and Populism:
Preamble: --Here I was, with a mounting pile of increasingly-dense tomes on structural crises (climate/ecology/geopolitical economy) which I want to unpack/make accessible, yet somehow only finding time to stare at my notes for reviewing “chaos” (ex. “Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male”). …Yes, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. …I tried to convince myself it was a worthy case study because of Peterson’s reach here in Canada, where some circles which I can reach consider him synonymous with “public intellectual” and “dissident” (for contrast, I associated these terms with Chomsky when I was learning to apply critical thinking to politics: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky). …This dragged on for a year and a review finally manifested as “1 Rule for Reactionism: An Anesthesia to Chaos”, with a punchline of “Numb yourselves to the pain of others, for you can still rise above them…”, which did help me iron out a few ideas in addition to unpacking Peterson vs. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and playing with fascism from below and fascism from above.
--Now a touch of serendipity: it turns out Naomi Klein, another of my early “public intellectual”/“dissident” influences (who has recently joined my favourite department at my local university) has emerged from her own rabbit-hole [emphases added]:
In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. […] Not now—not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet.
[…] I told myself it was “research.” That if I was going to understand her [Naomi Klein’s doppelganger: Naomi Wolf] and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows with names like QAnon Anonymous and Conspirituality that unpack and deconstruct the commingling worlds of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with Covid-19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism. This on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest.
The Missing:
1) Contextualizing Klein’s readership: --There was certainly an initial relief in reading a familiar voice (and climate/anti-capitalist activist) detail her own misadventures researching the reactionary rabbit-hole, enough for me to consider this as my favourite Klein book. --My longstanding critique of Klein has been contradictory: a) Her reach: --Since the success of her 2000 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein’s audience has expanded into the Western bubble of default liberals (with some vague Leftish sentiments, who read books… we can debate how mainstream this actually is). When you live in North America (esp. the more apolitical Canada), this is the default ideology of public education; Leftists (esp. structural critiques of capitalism) still struggle to find traction here. --If you search for accessible critiques of “capitalism” here, Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism often appears at the top. From the context of the target audience, this is surely a success, as they would never read and contextualize something like Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. b) The impossibility of full Leftist representation: --Of course, reading reviews from comrades remind me of how those not needing Klein’s bridge (i.e. “self-respecting” oppressed groups, Leftists already reading Klein’s sources) put pressure on Klein (as one of the few bridges to more mainstream audiences). Friction can help us learn. --But of course there is no way a single person can (or should) represent all the diverse, radical views. And of course the messaging will be diluted and framed (yes, marketed) in the context for default liberals which seems inappropriate to radicals. Ex. radicals may approach this topic by centering works like black radical W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double-consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk), which Klein mentions briefly in Ch.14. --This latest book may polarize this contradiction even more with its memoir format, given how these different groups relate to Klein’s context. Reviewing this contradiction just reminds me that my goal is synthesis. Those who already relate to Klein will of course love her writing style applied to personal details [emphasis added]:
What made it worse for me was that, with [Naomi] Wolf’s new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody ofThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was not yet confused with my doppelganger all that often, I knew that some people would credit me with Wolf’s theories. It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest, and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: “Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
2) “Conspiracy” in the Western Bubble: --Before we continue, “What is Politics?” reminds me to be extra careful with political terms (“Left”, “Right”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, etc.). I define how I use “reactionary” (right-wing reaction to status quo crisis), “conservative” (conserving hierarchical traditions), “liberal” (cosmopolitan capitalism, current status quo), etc. in my Jordan Peterson review; I did not use “neo-fascism” in that review, which I’ll distinguish as follows: a) Peterson: “reactionary” to status quo (cosmopolitan capitalism) crisis, with vague hand-waving regarding “suffering” and women-chaos vs. men-order. Hence, an anesthesia to chaos. b) Steve Bannon: also “reactionary” to status quo crisis, but his right-wing nationalism is buttressed by concrete geopolitical economic/military strategy (with the historical precedence of Mussolini/Hitler), hence a new fascism (“neo-fascism”). --“conspiracy without the theory”: conspiracies (secret plots usually by the powerful to do something bad/illegal) are normal and expected given our material conditions of concentrated private powers amidst great inequality. Global capitalism’s most significant planning are all done behind closed doors of power (capitalist class of financiers/industrialists and their lobbyists; military, etc., with all their contradictions), and the public relations for their conspiracies become our political theater. What is illegality when you write the law? However, this occurs within the logic of capitalism’s structural absurdities, which need to be carefully theorized. --I’ll highlight how Klein unpacks reactionary “conspiracy theories” later. Let’s start with “conspiracy theories” in general. One check I find helpful is to take a step back and consider if the hype is from the echo-chamber of the Western/US bubble.
[…] but I laughed at America's fear Of a New World Order controllin' the hemisphere 'Cause my people been livin' that for the past 500 years
[-Immortal Technique (R.A. the Rugged Man “Who Do We Trust?”)]
--Ex. “JFK assassination conspiracy theories”: is a conspiracy possible here? Of course, but does this deserve so much attention where, if proven, will lead to some paradigm shift? I think this is mostly for those still stuck in the US political theatre, which does not represent the global community despite its oversized influence. JFK’s administration featured technocrats like Robert McNamara, who later escalated the genocidal war on Vietnam under LBJ (which included an actual false-flag conspiracy, the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”) and after became president of the World Bank to derail Global South decolonization/industrialization and get them to export cash crops and starve. --Ex. “911 Inside Job”: possible? Of course, but how much is the emphasis on the geopolitical ties with Saudi Arabia monarchy? See Paul Jay interviewing Senator Bob Graham. How much would proving an inside job actually affect the global “War on Terror”, the endless US interventions and military bases around the world, etc.? --Ex. “COVID-19 plandemic”: possible? Well, lab leak certainly, as scientific research is distorted by anti-social incentives (military industrial complex, patenting monopolization, cost-cutting outsourcing, publication bias, etc.). But “Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever” sounds rather Hollywood (despite exploiting historical truths like the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) when the Global South is protesting against vaccine apartheid (i.e. Global North hoarding vaccines) because of capitalist patent monopolization (a longstanding issue with the global reach of “Big Pharma”). Even academics from liberalism have warned of contradictions promoting pandemics (ex. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance). Of course Leftists take deeper dives: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.
The Good:
1) Wolf’s liberal contradictions and crisis: --In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explores how global capitalism’s structural crises (note: from structural contradictions more than deliberately manufactured by individual elites) in the late 1960’s brought a state of shock which opportunists (“free market” economics of “Neoliberalism”) could exploit to dismantle the status quo (New Deal’s welfare state compromise). --Note: Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) and Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) focus on the geopolitical material conditions (materialism) behind the crises that drove even New Dealers in power (ex. Paul Volcker, who advised Nixon on the Nixon Shock 1971 and later committed the Volcker Shocks as chairman of the Federal Reserve 1979-87) to dismantle the New Deal/unleash Wall Street’s volatility to preserve the US empire, whereas “free market” economists were more of an ideological cover. …Meanwhile, Klein’s framing focuses on the battle of ideas (idealism) where some opportunist economists (“free market” fundamentalists like Milton Friedman) took over. One constructive takeaway seems to be learning from the Right’s tactics: the Left needs to prepare ready-to-go constructive alternatives (not just deconstructive critiques) to present during opportunities. However, this requires careful analysis of the material structures/conditions of the crisis. --With the 1960’s youth radicalism being neutralized by “Neoliberalism”, we see the first appearance of Naomi Wolf in her 1990 The Beauty Myth as part of “Third-wave Feminism”. Klein notes how Wolf’s framing was to help individualist middle-class (professional/educated/“white”) women better compete with men in liberal meritocracy, thus neglecting the ongoing intersectionality critiques (intersections of class/race/gender) by Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, etc. …This only escalated with Wolf’s 2nd book, 1993’s Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century, a “lean in” approach to power which saw Wolf connect with the Democratic Party (Clinton/Gore). --In 2014, Wolf stepped out-of-line of the liberal status quo by speaking against Israel’s latest violence against Gaza (“1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed that summer, compared with 6 Israeli civilians; 789 Palestinian fighters were killed, compared with 67 Israeli soldiers.”), which led to “anti-Semitism” smears in mainstream media, losing her university position and getting online threats. Later, Klein examines the mirroring of the Holocaust/Israel apartheid.
For the rest of the review, see the comment section below… “2) A Vacuum for reactionary populism” “3) Bannon’s embrace and Neo-fascist strategy” “4) “Socialism or Barbarism””...more
Preamble: --An antidote to Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?… --Let me re-trace the steps that led me to consider a speculative fiction as my most-enjoyable read of the year: i) For context, fiction is buried in my list of reading priorities, relegated to when my brain is in a stupor. I’ve just found little success in fiction for the questions that haunt me. ii) The last fiction to captivate me is Varoufakis’ 2020 Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present; however, this was assisted by the (geo)political economy that was at the center of the book (i.e. structurally, how could capitalist markets for labour/finance/land, global trade imbalances, etc. be abolished). iii) This year, I’ve been systematically (re)reading Graeber (RIP), in particular his under-read magnum opus Direct Action: An Ethnography (written in 2009, before Graeber’s 2011 breakthrough Debt: The First 5,000 Years). One highlight is analysis/demonstration of the uses of speculative/science fiction and ethnography… iv) …And, lo and behold, I encounter this book which combines speculative/science fiction and ethnography (oral histories)! What a perfect playground to experiment with Graeber’s analyses (wish Graeber had found the time to write a sci-fi)!
Highlights: --Each one of these 12 short-story oral histories deserves a full-length book, which I would read (12-for-12 is a stunning success rate for me!). Overall reflections:
1) Capitalist Realism or Capitalist Crises? --Before we imagine alternatives, we need to be clear on the present situation. In the next section, we’ll explore why fiction seems to avoid carefully unpacking “capitalism” (i.e. political economy). In this book’s (fictional) introduction:
Unfortunately, explaining the global market before liberation is beyond the scope of this project. We highly recommend Understanding the Capitalist Market, Understanding the Geopolitics of Imperialist Nation States, and Understanding Wage Dependency as supplemental reading to this section [these are fictional works].
--My one-line summary of “capitalism”: the commodification of society, in particular the peculiar markets of labour/land/money featuring the “fictitious commodities” of humans/nature/purchasing power, which are not “produced” just for selling/buying on markets. Yes, Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time is an exhausting read for this, but luckily we have eloquent nonfiction like Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails to introduce this. I’ve also summarized Fraser’s synthesis of Marx + Polanyi here. --I find this political economy builds a strong foundation to appreciating the underlying contradictions of capitalism, whereas most historical accounts only reveal the brief surfacing of crises (consider: Thinking in Systems: A Primer). --“Capitalist Realism” cannot be a totality; this cancer/virus could not have survived without its host. Capitalism is dependent on: i) outsourcing its contradictions (slavery/colonialism/imperialism, settler colonialism), and ii) watered-down socialist policies (so social reproduction is not extinguished). …Vivid examples include the Enclosures/Industrial Revolution’s commodification (and degradation) of humans/nature to create the labour/land markets in brutal workhouses and “dark Satanic Mills”, culminating in a social crisis in Europe only relieved by: i) settler migration (relief to Europe’s labour market), and ii) public sanitation/health policies (relief to social reproduction): Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World --Thus, this books recognizes: i) looming capitalist crises, ii) the opportunities they present as the status quo crumbles iii) to expand socialist causes, some already somewhat in practice out of necessity; see Debt: The First 5,000 Years for Graeber’s “actually-existing communism” (in contrast to myths of “primitive communism”/“mythic communism”/“epic communism”):
But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.
Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.
--Crises: national states become increasing vulnerable to social protest. States are unable to maintain social reproduction/outsource its contradictions under the mounting burden of the parasitic/volatile finance (speculative gambling/debts for rent-seeking) and accelerating ecological collapse, bringing down the “middle class” (who have been an essential buffer for “Capitalist Realism”). When things we take for granted collapse (ex. car transportation), seemingly insurmountable social norms follow (ex. car culture); paraphrasing Assange, humans are extremely adaptive to both change (heroic efforts to survive) and status quo (tragic efforts to tolerate oppression). A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster …One of the states to collapse is China, which opens up a can of worms on really-existing socialism. I’ll bypass this (still working to synthesize with Graeber’s analysis of “bureaucracy”) by saying that Western imperialist states also collapse, so the siege is over… these other crises include: i) collapse of the US dollar (“dedollarization” has recently become a trendy topic, so we need to dig deeper: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) ii) even the US military, with its overreach attacking Iran leading to mutinies. While many Leftists are allergic to studying the US military given its endless layers of imperialism/conservatism, we should not all abandon careful study of its contradictions, including its dissenters from War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier to Veterans for Peace, to comparisons between wartime mobilization and the Green New Deal (which must be analyzed with extreme caution! For a critical take that re-centers the Global South: A People’s Green New Deal). Similarly, Graeber points to the academic bias where academics attribute importance to what is intellectually interesting (thus, neglecting the importance of sheer violence with all its vulgar stupidity). iii) further pandemics (Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19); collapse of capitalist healthcare [emphases added]:
Of course, it wasn’t the doctor who had really turned grannie away [for not having health insurance]! It was the hospital! And who was the hospital? It was whoever was making money off it, and those faces were invisible. It was the whole fucking system. I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” This system had taken everything from me, from us. It had taken my mom, my grannie—even myself. It had even taken me away from me.
iv) collapse of academia (capital tied to volatile finance):
Like, the universities are gone, of course, or the idea these specialized fields of knowledge are separated out from the rest of life or not subject to the same logic of profit and exchange. But, in this other way, the zeal for knowledge was saved. Way, way more people read and debate philosophy and theory than ever when I was growing up.
v) We should add Varoufakis’ hacktivism targeting the fragility of financial risk in Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and supply chain vulnerabilities in Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain.
…See the comments below for the rest of the review: “2) Synthesizing the Left’s conflicts” and “3) Resilience in Diversity”…...more
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